The site has undergone some changes. The previous site was monochrome and a bit bland. I wanted to inject more colour and personality into it.
I've spent a bit of time evaluating my site. There is a lot of information there. Most of it is dry and technical. For 2017, I will make it my goal to try to write some more interesting blog posts. Let's see how that goes.

Static sites are making a comeback. People are starting to see advantages such as speed and security.
Jekyll is a simple, blog-aware, static site generator that is distributed under an open source license. Once installed and setup it means there is no need to worry about security updates for your site.

Google is about to change its search algorithm. The new algorithm will place a greater emphasis on mobile friendly sites. Sites that are not mobile friendly will drop down the list. This has been dubbed “mobilegeddon” by some.

This change will start rolling out from the 21st of April. Mobilegeddon implies some kind of browser apocalypse. Mobile unfriendly sites won’t disappear from Google but mobile friendly sites will get priority.

I've been a busy behind the scenes remaking our website. The new site shouldn't look radically different from the old one. The major changes are behind the scenes. We've moved the site from being Zurb Foundation based Drupal to Codeigniter using Bourbon, Bitters and Neat.

The time to make your website mobile friendly is now. Hits from mobile devices are expected overtake desktop browsers within the next 3 years.

In Australia, as of May, 2013 about 13% of hits to websites came from a mobile device. This may seem like a small number. However, the real story is the growth. In May, 2010, hits from mobile devices made up 2.6% of the total. One year later, this had increased to 5.3%. A year ago, the number was 8.3%. The trend is clear. More and more people are using mobile devices to access the web. Some pundits are claiming that mobile usage is doubling approximately every 18 months.

We could build an in-house CMS and house your site on that. That's exactly what a lot of our competitors do. The big advantage is a highly customised interface. If this is done well, the result could be huge gains for the customer.

We could spend time developing our own CMS. We did try to but it never progressed beyond the alpha testing stage. However, it would be very difficult for us to compete with a large developer community. Open source software is built by a dedicated community of programmers who have far more specialist programming skills in that area than we do.

Websites are an important part of your business. They operate as a virtual shopfront, a cyber window into your world. A content management system migh be exactly what you need, but there are also times when a CMS is overkill.

Standards make things standard. I know it's an obvious statement but it's meant to be. The reasons for having standards should be obvious too. The web used to be designed for Netscape or Internet Explorer. You either designed to get the best for one browser or you designed a compromise to suit both. The other way around it was do two designs and set a javascript routine to sniff the browser and direct the use to the appropriate files. This is extra work and what happens if you decide to incorporate another browser into your design? Another set of files?